The security system can be controlled with a smartphone.

Photograph by: Shaughn Butts
, Edmonton Journal

Is it the decor or design? Number of rooms? Floor plan? To the Chalifours of Fort Saskatchewan, calm is critical to their sense of home.

Katy Chalifour grew up in Montreal. After meeting and marrying her husband Remi, the couple lived for 11 years in Quebec City.

Katy still loves the pace, the urban experiences and cosmopolitan flavour of larger cities. But she feels far more at peace in a small, quiet bedroom community.

After all, Remi is often away. He works for weeks at a time on the rigs.

Before the rigs, he was in the military. Remi was deployed seven times, for as long as a year, to theatres of war and unrest.

When Remi retired from the military, he and Katy began looking for homes. Last year, the couple and their children - Sebastien, 18, and Jenah, 14 -moved into a new neighbourhood in the Fort.

The new house is 3,000 square feet, with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. The basement, not included in those numbers, remains unfinished.

Perhaps the most unique feature of the home is the master bedroom and its attached bathroom. Mom and dad's enclave takes up half the top floor.

Most striking is the attached bathroom. It is humongous, with a tiled, floating bathtub in its midst.

A large family room also sits on the upper floor, along with the kids' bedrooms and their shared bathroom.

The living room, dining room and kitchen on the main floor are open and blessed with natural light via large windows and the patio doors.

The furnishings, of dark, carved woods and leather, are statuesque. Each dining room chair is weighty enough to cause lower-back injury.

The house is exceedingly tidy and neat. Katy is a self-described clean freak. Her children, she says, have learned.

Yet none of this - the furnishings, layout or size of the new house - is what makes the house feel particularly homey to the Chalifours.

What makes them sleep well at night - and stay relaxed at home or away - is a modern security system. The Vivent system allows Katy and Remi to keep track of house and children from anywhere, on their smartphones.

The system includes some standard fare: sensors to detect motion, or the status of doors and windows.

But doors can be opened or locked remotely. Streaming video from interior cameras can be viewed on smartphones, meaning there'll be no hijinks when the parents are on vacation.

The system also logs the comings and goings of family members by their access codes. No sneaking out, either, children.

The system also allows lights to be turned on or dimmed from a distance. This helps create the appearance of occupation, even when the family is away.

Most of us live lives of ho-hum routine and taken-for-granted security. We might laugh off home security and the people who install it in their houses.

But there's always another side to a story. For example, Katy's childhood home was broken into. As a young teenager she was a victim of a violent crime.

Soon after that incident, her boyfriend took his own life. The trauma of the death and violence in her early life still haunts Katy.

As for Remi, well, he was a signals technician in the military. He was the voice on the other end of the radio for soldiers in harm's way.

Yet it meant he often heard the screams and pleas of soldiers under attack, injured or dying.

Our homes are supposed to be a refuge. So if the Chalifours' lives feel better for their high-tech security system, then it is well and good that they invested in one.

Katy says Remi is better able to relax when he's away from home, as he is so often. The security system allows him to check on his family - even see them on the security camera - on his laptop or phone.

"And I'm able to sleep at night," says Katy, of her security setup. "I don't sleep with a knife anymore."

Excuse me? She laughs. Yes, she used to keep a knife in the night table drawer. When the kids got older, she put away the knife and stored a baseball bat near her bed.

In her new Fort Saskatchewan home, with doors locked and the alarms set, Katy Chalifour sleeps comfortably.

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